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About a year and a half ago I bought a Vizio P65 TV. The Model was C1 at that time. This model is apparently no longer available, apparently. The new model is E1 as shown here.

Just after a year, when the TV was out of warranty, two of the four HDMI ports failed. I paid about $400 for an out of warranty repair to replace the “Main Board” and the HDMI ports all work now. The repair required two folks, since the TV is very heavy and must be laid down on it’s face for a mainboard repair. Also the folks drove over 200 miles to reach my house, so I doubt if they broke even on the repair.

Now the TV is Rebooting

However, after this repair, about twice, or more, times per day, the TV seizes up and reboots.

When it reboots, almost always, but not always, the restart process starts with the screen showing a repeating pattern of the lower few rows of the screen. Then after about 10 seconds, the TV restarts showing the Vizio brand chevron. This example happened while watching the Dish Hopper.

A long time ago I got some Cabela’s Moccasin Duck Boots. These are great for here in Coastal Oregon, where the grass never dries. And they should be easy to slip on and off at the door. But the problem is that they never were easy to put on and take off. The Tongue of the shoes was turned in rather than out.

As you can see from these pictures, I’ve figured out how to re-string the laces to correct this issue. On the left is the original shoe and the right picture shows one repaired shoe.

Just switched to Spectrum 400mbps service. It’s great. 400 mbps down, 20 mbps up. And I hear a rumor that they are going to provide 1 Gbps service soon. My YouTube posts now complete in a reasonable time. Fibre comes to my street and the last 100 yards or so is coax. My service is about $70 / month for internet alone.

Not a paid endorsement, just a happy customer. The installation procedure is much more modern and up to date with Spectrum than with the local phone company, that is still operating with hand typed username / passwords to configure DSL modem. The Spectrum modem configure operation was a photo shot of the bar codes on the router into the installer’s mobile phone with their special app, and away we go in seconds. The local phone company has no plans for faster service, in spite of the fact that my house is only a little farther away from their fibre head end box.

I’ve recently had problems with my internet service. My DSL router is apparently re-syncing causing my public IP address to change. Apparently my ISP uses PPOE rather than DHCP, and apparently PPOE does not allow “Reservations”, which allows a client computer to use the same IP address if it reconnects within a given amount of time. Your home router uses DHCP, which does do reservations, so your computers LAN IP address does not change if the computer connects every 24 hours, which I understand is the default “Reservation” time.

Re-synching is not only a problem because the internet is out for a short amount of time, but also because the IP address change causes some games to require that you “Verify” your IP address by reporting a code that is sent to your email account. This is obviously an issue if the Re-Sync happens several times per day.

After quite a bit of research I found a windows service that logs the Public IP address to the Windows Event log every 15 minutes. I run one of my windows systems all the time, since it’s running Carbonite, so this system will run the PublicIpLogger program.

From Github, download the setup.exe file and run it. Then you can enter “view event log” into Cortana and you should see a choice to run the windows event viewer. The program logs your public IP address to the event log every 15 minutes.

As shown, under Application and Service Logs, find the PublicIpLogger events and there are a number of events that show the Public IP address, whether they have changed or not.

So your password can’t be cracked.

and

So you can easily use a different password for every site.

If one site is hacked, then the bad guys will try your email and password at lots of other sites just to see if they get a hit. Same password on different sites? Bad idea.

Let’s look at the math of password cracking.

There are about 3000 common words in English, and most other languages.

So if you pick, for example, an easily remembered password containing two words, with initial capital letters, and then follow those two words by three numbers, you get:

3000*3000*1000 possible passwords or:

Sounds like a big number, right? Not really. Not only can modern graphics cards whiz through these in a few hours, but if the website where passwords were stolen did not use a different “Salt” for every password hash, then they can “pre-make” a list of the hashes and then look for matches in much less time. Instantly. It’s just a look in a table rather than a search with billions of calculations. Does the site where you last typed in your credit card “salt” their hashes? Salting is adding some gobbly gook to your password before they hash it. And the gobbly gook is different for every customer. Yep. Keeping track of passwords is that complicated. I’m not going to cover it all here. Just saying, it’s a complicated business and many companies short cut the process, or don’t use modern security methods to keep track of passwords.

Imagine for a moment that we have a receiver from 2013 – pre 4K – that contains an HDMI switch. Now imagine that one buys almost any TV today – almost all of them support 4K. Now imagine that one purchases something that produces video – BluRay player, XBox Console, Playstation, even a modern set top box. Most of these support 4K video.

So what happens if the EDID from the 4K TV passes unchanged through the NR1504 from 2013 to the video source that can produce 4K? Well the source happily produces 4K video and the NR1504 cannot pass it. Black screen? Apparently.

Was the Marantz 1504 never modifying the EDID? Or did it just start not modifying the EDID? Or did the Linux computer get a new driver that was willing to produce 4K video?

I hooked up an HD monitor to the NR1504 and hooked the Linux box back up to the Media input and voila. Everything works fine, of course.

It seems clear that in this world of ubiquitous 4K sources and displays, the Marantz NR1504 needs to be modifying the EDID or producing one of it’s own to continue to work.

I’ve used the display settings in Linux to use HD only and that works fine with the TV, but when I plugged it back into the NR1504 it still didn’t work. Oh well. Time for a new Receiver that gets 4K. But at least I can use the Linux system by plugging it directly into the TV and setting it to HD.

I’ve had a Marantz NR1504 for a couple of years at least. As you can see, it was released in 2013 and is no longer made – according to Marantz Tech Support.

My Marantz NR1504 Receiver recently took an update over the internet. Automatically. And the next time my Linux Mint System booted, the receiver refused to pass video from the Linux system. Dish Hopper and Sony Bluray player work fine. I thought the problem was the Linux Kernel Update that I’d done, so I pulled the machine out of the Entertainment system and attached another monitor to it thinking that I would need to re-install Linux Mint 18.2, but it came up fine with the other monitor. Also, I’ve swapped HDMI cable and used other Receiver input ports, and when the Linux system is attached directly to the Vizio Pseries TV, it works fine, in FREAKING 4K no less. Of course the NR1504 only supports HD, not 4K. In 4K the print is so small on my 65″ TV that I can barely see it. But it works fine and Youtube is also fine.

I accepted a software update of the kernel on my LM 18.2 system, and now it won’t boot. Probably someone rushed out a SpecterMelt fix or something. Anyway, I need to back out these kernels later than 4.4.0-98 so they aren’t boot options. If I restart now I need to go through grub advanced options to get system started.

How do I back out these recent kernels?

Update: Use the Update Manager > View > Linux Kernels to choose which ones you want and you can back them out.

Update Update:Not a crash at all. Linux was fine. The Marantz NR1504 took an update that blacked the screen. Linux works fine to other monitors and the 4K TV without problems on the latest kernel.

Yet again, something changed to break network file sharing between LM19 and Windows 10. Here’s the fix. Windows 10 could see a LM19 file share just fine, but LM19 could not see the Win 10 file shares. < Again back-dated to keep it off the front page. >

Edit /etc/samba/smb.conf and right under the workgroup = WORKGROUP line add this one:

Code: Select all

client max protocol = NT1

Then reboot.

If you have Win10 on your network and it has disabled SMB1 on the server side you will not be able to connect to it.

This allows the Linux Mint 19 system to see the Windows 10 file shares.

To see the Linux Mint 19 system from the Windows 10 systems just use the Software Manager to install SAMBA and then set up a file share of say, your home folder. Be sure and change the name to something else, not just your user name. For some reason just your user name fouls up the share.

Here’s the view from the Linux Mint side:

For some reason there were two GBLM19 computers, but this was probably an artifact of the changes I was making while trying to get this to work. After a few minutes it settled down to only one that worked from Windows 10. They both worked from Linux looking in to itself.

Here is the view from the Windows 10 system:

I still cannot ping from the Linux system to the Win 10 machines. Apparently there is a fire wall issue. Well that’s for tomorrow. I can ping the LM system from the Win 10 machines.